


Omophakites

by gayabstractconcept



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Drama, Grindr, I Don't Know Either, M/M, cigarette burns, the small madness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 09:29:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13268577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayabstractconcept/pseuds/gayabstractconcept
Summary: “There’s a thread of frenzy inside your soul that’s never been plucked. You’ve been aching for it for years, aching to know what it is to lose your rational mind, lose your words, lose every thought in your head, become nothing more than an insensible body, a panting, rutting animal,  - but nobody’s ever drawn that out of you, have they? Is it that nobody’s ever known how...or perhaps that nobody has tried?”





	Omophakites

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alder_knight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alder_knight/gifts), [magnum_mouth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnum_mouth/gifts).



“Seeking something beautiful.”

Richard scrolls through the cruising apps aimlessly, as if riffling his fingertips through a rolodex without actually reading the cards in it. The sensation of touching each image, each possibility, is sensual without being pleasurable.

“Seeking something beautiful” is the text on one of the images, plain white on black in courier font. He puts his phone down, reaches in his pocket for a cigarette.  
The pack isn’t there; he remembers he was trying to trick himself into cutting down by hiding it from himself. It’s raining hard, and the window of his walk-up is rattling in its frame. He shouldn’t have a cigarette, he wasn’t supposed to be smoking inside and it’s too wet to go outside. He crosses his ankles on the pile of notebook paper rendering a small ottoman invisible, then crosses them the other way. Abruptly gets up, takes the three steps from the living room to the kitchen, and takes his pack of cigarettes out of the microwave.

He’s hidden his lighter from himself too and he rummages through a few drawers to find it. His silverware drawer has four plastic takeout forks, a pocketknife, and few pairs of chopsticks, but no lighter. Eventually he gives up and lights his cigarette off the gas stove.

His phone buzzes from across the room and he finishes his cigarette slowly, letting the smoke hang heavy and blue in the room, and drops the butt in an empty bottle, before going to look at it.

He’s been working on his PhD for so long he can’t even really remember what he’s studying anymore, and in the afternoons he copyedits for five cents a word, and there’s something picturesque and shabby and tiring about it. He keeps his apartment hot all year round and doesn’t leave it much. He dreams about Henry a lot, but usually it’s as they were when they were boys, gangly and pretentious and always a little drunk, Henry’s eyes sharp, mouth hot, hands trembling on his hips, Henry’s lips moving against Richard’s skin as he recited poetry down the length of Richard’s thigh, his low, expressive voice trailing greek words too sweet for him to ever say in English, vibrating them over Richard’s cock.

For a long time, he woke up from these dreams and had to stare at the ceiling and breathe through his nose and wait for his erection to go away.

Now he thinks he might not have a sex drive anymore, and that’s fine. He doesn’t wake up hard anymore, just a little hollow-feeling as if something about the shape and size of a fat book of greek poetry, something solid and important, has vanished from where it belonged inside him, leaving behind a sensation of caving-in, of unsteadiness.

He looks at the message on his phone. It’s from “seeking something beautiful.”

For a moment, he’s back in Morrow’s office. And what is beauty? Terror.

The message reads, “Interested?”

The profile is sparse. His age, smaller than him, the words: “right now.”

He so rarely gets messages. He so rarely answers them. He’s almost entirely uninterested in sex, particularly in sex with strangers.

He types, “I’m not sure if I qualify as ‘beautiful,’” and touches “send.”

A pause. A tree branch lashes against the window in the rain, and while he’s startled from that, the phone makes a sound.

“Show me.”

Impeccably typed, almost delicately.

Richard stares at the message for a long minute, then lights another cigarette and sends over the only photo he has, a crop of a news article about his academic work in which he’s looking rumpled and dreamy and Californian. After he sends the picture, he throws his phone onto his desk and himself onto the floor, where he smokes his cigarette past the filter and tries to pretend he’s not just listening for a vibration.

It’s so long that he thinks maybe “seeking something beautiful” agreed with his assessment and just isn’t going to answer, but then it happens and he’s on his feet between the sound of one raindrop hitting his window and the next, tossing papers to the floor as he grabs for it.

“Shall I tell you what I’m going to do to you?”

Impulses war in Richard.

“I’m listening.”

“I’m going to drive you mad.”

The words are affected and archaic, just strange enough to feel familiar, thrilling. He keeps going.

“How?”

A long pause.

“There’s a thread of frenzy inside your soul that’s never been plucked. You’ve been aching for it for years, aching to know what it is to lose your rational mind, lose your words, lose every thought in your head, become nothing more than an insensible body, a panting, rutting animal, - but nobody’s ever drawn that out of you, have they? Is it that nobody’s ever known how...or perhaps that nobody has tried?”

Richard puts his phone back down on his desk and goes for a walk in the rain. It’s cool on his heated skin, which is how he knows he’s blushing. His shirt is soaked through and clinging to him by the time he makes it back -- he’s long since stopped squinting and hunching against it, and his hair is plastered to his face, his eyes full of water.

With wet fingers he opens up the messages with “seeking something beautiful” and says “Now?”

“Yes.”

He’s sent an address and, as if in a trance, he goes. The rain is harder than ever, and the six block walk feels like the dream experience of trying to move one’s limbs through ever-thickening tar, running faster and faster but traveling slower and slower.

The building is elaborate, old, not well taken care of. It looks like some anomaly of real estate has kept it, low and crooked and almost churchlike, squatting preserved between highrises. It looks like the place where someone old and eccentric might live, might have lived for decades. He wonders if “seeking something beautiful” was lying about his age.

He tries the doorknob and it squeals open. Water is pouring off him, out of his hair, as he steps into the dark, sepulchral hallway. He slicks it back out of his face, wipes his eyes with a sleeve that’s not dry either. It smells like smoke and old wood, and he calls, tentatively, “Hello?”

A figure emerges from the darkness, a shock of red hair wild to his shoulders, a white A-shirt. A thin trail of smoke. It can’t be.

It can’t be. Richard feels his heartbeat try to smash its way out of his chest as Francis says “Hello, Richard.”

“You --” Richard says stupidly, trying again to wipe his eyes dry. “You --?”

Francis steps forward, close to him -- too close -- and he thinks his knees might fold. When they were boys, Francis was thin as a rail, with all the knobby elegance of a baby giraffe, and while he’s no less angular now, somehow it’s lean and a little dangerous instead.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw you,” Francis tells him. His voice is different, lower, not less affected but perhaps with an affectation of a different decade.

“What do you want?” Richard finds himself saying as he’s backed one step at a time up against the door he’d closed behind himself. Francis is small but cuts through the air in front of him like the sharpest knife, and Richard realizes he can’t actually push back.

“I told you,” Francis is smiling, the hand that’s not holding his cigarette splaying like a great pale spider over the center of Richard’s chest, sliding minisculely upwards until Richard is pinned in place. He takes a drag and fills the air between them with smoke. “I want to drive you mad. I want to give you the frenzy.”

Richard wants to ask why but the hand on his chest seems to stop him from getting a full breath in or out. His unasked question is answered, somehow, as Francis’s fingertips reach his throat.

“It was me and Henry, after that night, it was the two of us, feeling the ache of it together, reassuring each other that it was real, trying, always trying, to touch it again. It was different for us than for the others. It was him and me, and now --”

That long-fingered hand curls around the side of Richard’s neck, touches his brainstem, holds the top of his spine possessively. “Now it’s just me.”

“I’ve been alone in it for fifteen years. I’ve been searching for a way back. I’d give anything to feel it again. I know you want it too. I know you were jealous, jealous that we’d done it without you, jealous that you didn’t get to feel it, jealous –“ He lifts his face to Richard’s and, delicately, with the same precision of movement that has characterized his body since college, bites his lower lip – “that you never got to fuck me the way Henry did.”

At once Richard’s body is flooded with memory and fantasy; Henry fucking Francis, Henry fucking him, the way Henry must have engulfed Frances, swallowed him whole, Francis’s hair moving against Henry’s belly, Francis arching on Henry’s cock, Henry sinking down on Richard’s cock, running through pitch-black woods, raw meat between his teeth, lust, loss, grief.

He whimpers, and Francis gives a little huff of satisfaction against his mouth. Richard wonders if Henry ever let Francis make him come. He doesn’t want to know. He desperately wants to know.

He lets his hands close around Francis’s narrow waist and whirls him into the wall. All the breath escapes from Francis at the impact, and he draws it back in in a snarl. “You want to drive me crazy, Francis, you’re putting in a good effort already.”

Francis lets himself be shoved, his body fluid and open, and then pushes forward into his grip. “Not crazy. Mad.”

Richard blinks to clear away the visions of Henry, Henry licking his neck, Henry thudding to the carpet with pink and gray trickling out of a too-real-looking hole in his skull, Henry smiling up at him, breath playing over the wetness he’d left on Richard’s skin.

He thinks he might be mad already.

“Come inside,” says Francis, and is already gone.

Richard follows him into what turns out to be an enormous studio – a single room making up the whole floor of the building, with ceilings so high he’s not sure it isn’t a converted church. Francis lights two cigarettes and gives him one with a motion so familiar it’s like they’re back in Monmouth and they’re all there and everything is back to normal at last.

But instead of that, Francis takes a drag and turns his back to him. His voice rides on a blue cloud as he says, “It is a different thing to be crazy. To be crazy is to be disconnected from consensual reality. Madness is not disconnection, but overconnection.”

He throws himself onto the bed that stands in the center of the room and Richard remembers the way his mouth felt, just that once.

“It’s having all of the barriers that protect you stripped away until what’s left of you is irreducible. It’s the loss of everything that you can lose and still be remotely recognizable as yourself.”

His voice is flat, his eyes unfocused and pointing to the back left corner of the room. Memory makes his words sharp; he is speaking with nearly inexpressible yearning.

“Once you’ve touched madness, you have to return to it every now and again, or it will rise up and swallow you.”

Richard finds he’s crossed the room and dropped to his knees by Francis’s bed, listening intently, intoxicated by the ferocity in Francis’s voice. Francis rolls up onto one elbow, putting his face a scant inch from Richard’s.

“It is inside me, Richard, and I think you feel it too. And I have had nobody, for so long, nobody with whom I could visit that beautiful wild country.”

Richard drags his cigarette, which has burned unsmoked nearly to the filter; he exhales, the warmth of Francis’s face radiating against his. He says, “Take me there.”

Francis kisses him. His mouth is cooler than Richard remembers, velvety with smoke, languorous. No madness yet.

It thrums Richard like an instrument string. Henry never wanted to kiss him much. He didn’t like how delicate Richard’s mouth was, he didn’t like how it made it impossible for him to pretend that it wasn’t happening.

Francis keeps kissing him and winds his free hand in the hair at the nape of Richard’s neck, pulling him closer, then skims his flat hand down Richard’s tense and trembling neck, his shoulder, his arm. Fingers close around his wrist as his attention is flooded with Francis’s tongue brushing against his lower lip, Francis leaning down from his reclining position on the bed, Francis holding him by the delicate bones of his wrist against the bedframe.

Francis stops kissing him and he whimpers and yearns forward, just a little, just enough to feel a trickle of shame that is replaced by sensation, pounding heart, when Francis turns his wrist up, presses his lips to the soft skin inside it, his hand that’s not holding a cigarette delicate and unyielding around his joint.

“There are several ways to get there,” he murmurs, and Richard feels the words against his pounding pulse. “We experimented with many of them, Henry and I. We did every drug we could think of. We danced like lunatics and made makeshift sensory deprivation chambers. We fought and drank and screamed into the night.”

Richard winces as images of Henry enter his mind’s eye, and Francis misreads and strokes his lips again along the blue river of vein under his translucent skin. “Don’t be frightened.”

He examines Richard’s wrist, and Richard’s eyes follow Francis’s, even though he doesn’t know what he’s looking at. His heart is beating so fast it feels like his hand must be about to shudder out of Francis’s grip.

After a long, breathless moment, Francis puts out his cigarette on Richard’s wrist.

It’s a slow moment of disbelief before the pain hits him and he hears himself yell, tries to jerk his hand away. Francis is surprisingly strong and won’t let him go, won’t lift the hissing filter from his skin. It smells like cooked flesh and tobacco and he pulls and pulls, breath almost sobbing, just animal instinct. He’s not speaking, his mind a flinch.

Francis says, “Do you feel that,” and he answers, finally getting his hand free, “what the fuck.”

“Do you feel that, Richard?”

“What the fuck,” he says again, holding his arm to his chest. There’s a small, neat, perfect black circle immediately between the two veins that run the length of his wrist. He stares at Francis, who is serene, a little quirk of a smile, the beginnings of an erection visible in his dark jeans.

As he stares at the shape of Francis’s cock through denim, he realizes that he’s hard too. Adrenaline is still clamoring through him. His cigarette starts to catch fire to the rug where he’d dropped it, and he stomps out the foul smoke. When he looks up, Francis has opened the top button of his pants. “Pain is a road,” he says. “Fear is a gate.” He holds out his hand to Richard.

Richard is still on his knees, and he leans forward, eyes fixed on that open button, and Francis wraps his fingers around Richard’s wrist again, the pad of his thumb covering the small burn. The pain from it is still spiking out from its scorched epicenter like electricity.

Francis lowers his zipper and Richard doesn’t hesitate. The cock in his mouth is as hot as the cigarette burn on his wrist and he thinks he might come away with a matching scorch mark on his tongue.

He sucks Francis’s cock as if he’s starving, as if he’ll never have another chance, as if it could bring Henry back to them, and Francis is laughing low and rolling his hips into Richard’s mouth and caressing the back and sides of Richard’s head with a lazy, trembling hand. He presses his thumb into Richard’s burn, hard, and Richard fills his throat with Francis’s cock to muffle the yelp that bubbles up in it.

“Just like that,” Francis is murmuring, “I’ll fucking fuck the frenzy down your throat, open up and take it for me. I’ve never felt a mouth so sweet, Henry never sucked my cock this nice, he was already too mad and he didn’t care if I liked it, god, god, Richard, god –“

Richard sucks harder on Francis’s cock to shut him up and feels Francis’s hand spasm around his wrist, digging into the burn, and then all at once Francis is springing forward off the bed, knocking him backwards, he’s falling – his head cracks on the floor – Francis is still fucking his mouth – his full, slight weight is on Richard’s face, braced on Richard’s injured wrist on the floor – cock shoving further down Richard’s throat as he arches – Richard is dazed, fireworks in his eyes, unable to pull in a breath – he is trapped and can’t quite think – it’s so good – so good.

He’s writhing under Francis’s weight as pressure builds behind his eyes, his chest jerking as he tries vainly to get oxygen. He can’t see, can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t think. The moans above him are high and thread, muffled. And then –

And then –

And then all of a sudden he’s not human anymore. 

When he comes back to himself, his chest is heaving with fast, sharp wheezes and everything smells like come. His ears are ringing as if someone had just screamed or set off an explosion or both. He isn’t sure how long it’s been, what happened. He notices he’s sticky too, his own cock wet and spent inside his jeans, and Francis is back on the bed, tucked away, sweaty and composed.

Richard coughs , wipes his mouth and wet eyes with the back of his hand. Pain spiderwebs up and down his arm.

“He never did that to me,” he rasps. “I don’t think he knew how.”

Francis smiles, a strangely sweet expression , and lights another cigarette.

“Beautiful,” he says. “Beautiful. I’m terrified.”

Richard leaves him there, hears him call, “Terrified, Richard,” after him in a mocking voice as he passes through the dark hallway. He doesn’t turn to see him as he goes because he knows it’s in him now, it’s in him and he’ll be back.


End file.
